Prospect New Town
Longmont, CO

America’s Coolest Neighborhood — and Colorado’s First New Urbanist Community

Prospect New Town is unlike any other neighborhood in Colorado. It is not simply a development with a philosophy — it is a neighborhood built to prove that the dominant model of suburban development was wrong, and that something better was possible. Developer Kiki Wallace, working with urban planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ, the same firm behind Seaside, Florida and Kentlands, Maryland), began planning the community in the mid-1990s on an 80-acre tree farm owned by the Wallace family in the southwest corner of Longmont. The main street into the community runs down Tenacity Drive — named in deliberate acknowledgment of the two years of regulatory battles it took to convince local authorities to allow the project. They won. The rest of the Front Range eventually followed.

Prospect is Colorado’s first full-scale new urbanist community. Its planning principles reject the defining features of conventional suburban development: no large front lawns, no garage-dominated facades, no segregation of residential from commercial uses. Instead, Prospect features narrow, tree-lined streets connecting homes to nine integrated parks; front porches that create the neighbor interaction that setback-dominated subdivisions eliminate; rear-loaded garages and alley access that return the house facade to the home rather than the car; and a town center with restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and offices built directly into the neighborhood rather than placed in a strip mall five miles away. The Rocky Mountain Institute participated as a sustainability consultant, and Habitat for Humanity has built homes within the community.

The architecture is Prospect’s most immediately visible distinction. Each home is designed by a different architect, working within a set of design rules that govern proportion, window ratios, roof pitch, and material choices — but not style. The result is a streetscape of genuinely varied, brightly colored, architecturally bold homes that feel coherent without being uniform. Metal barrel-vault roofs sit next to traditional Queen Anne porches. Black stucco sits next to clapboard. A home with clerestory windows and exposed wood beams faces one with a classic Colorado farmhouse design. The street names — Neon Forest Circle, Incorrigible Circle, Tenacity Drive — tell you something about the neighborhood’s personality before you’ve seen a single building.

Dwell Magazine named Prospect “America’s coolest neighborhood.” The residents, who have a median home sale price approaching $965,000, could be forgiven for agreeing. Inventory is consistently tight — homes here sell faster than the national average, and buyers who discover Prospect tend to stay discovered until something comes available.

Southwest Longmont — 15 Miles from Boulder, Surrounded by Farmland

Prospect sits along the west side of US-287 just south of Pike Road in the southwest corner of Longmont — a position that its own website accurately describes as a “pocket of city in a rural setting.” The surrounding landscape is still agricultural, which preserves both the mountain views and the sense of remove that gives the community its distinctive character. Boulder is approximately 15 miles south via US-287, making Prospect one of the most Boulder-proximate neighborhoods in Longmont — a daily commute reality that the community’s price premium relative to the rest of Longmont reflects directly.

Downtown Longmont is approximately 2.5 miles north and easily accessible by bike via the neighborhood’s trail connections. RTD bus stops operate along Pike Road on the neighborhood’s northern edge. The town center within Prospect itself — with restaurants, coffee shops, wellness businesses, and boutiques — reduces the number of car trips residents need to take for daily life in the first place, which is precisely what the new urbanist design intended.

Nine Integrated Parks, Left Hand Creek, and Rocky Mountain Views

• Nine parks integrated throughout the community
• Coffman Children’s Park (playground, picnic tables)
• Left Hand Creek Park (multi-use fields, roller hockey, basketball, volleyball)
• Longs Peak and Front Range mountain views throughout
• Narrow tree-lined streets — walkable and bikeable by design
• RTD bus stops at Pike Road (Boulder and Denver access)
• Trail connections to broader Longmont greenway network
• Community garden within development
• Twin Peaks Golf Course (18-hole public · short drive)
• St. Vrain Greenway Trail (multi-use · downtown connection)
• McIntosh Lake Nature Area (short drive · trails, wildlife)
• Rocky Mountain National Park (30 min northwest)

The nine small parks integrated throughout Prospect are not afterthoughts — they are design elements, placed at intersections and within blocks to create the public gathering spaces that conventional suburban development eliminates in favor of private yards. The mature trees planted along Prospect’s streets when the community was developed in the 1990s have grown into the shade canopy that makes the streets genuinely pleasant to walk on summer afternoons, which is, again, precisely what DPZ designed for.

Education in Prospect New Town

Prospect New Town feeds into one of the strongest school pipelines in the entire SVVSD — culminating at Niwot High School, which holds an A grade from Niche and is ranked the number one best magnet high school in Colorado. The IB Diploma Programme at Niwot and the IB Middle Years Programme at Sunset Middle School give Prospect families access to one of the most rigorous internationally recognized academic pathways available in public education anywhere in Boulder County.

All Longmont addresses are served by St. Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD). School attendance boundaries vary by address — always verify your specific school assignment directly with SVVSD before purchasing. The IB pathway described above reflects the typical pipeline for Prospect New Town addresses.

Where Prospect Residents Eat

The entire point of Prospect’s new urbanist design is that residents don’t have to leave the neighborhood for daily needs. The town center along Tenacity Drive and the surrounding blocks includes restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques within the community’s own footprint. Downtown Longmont’s full dining and brewery scene is a 5-minute bike ride or a 10-minute drive north on US-287.

Life in Prospect New Town

Prospect residents describe their neighborhood in terms that consistently come back to the same things: the front porch conversations that suburban setbacks eliminate, the morning walk to the coffee shop that the town center makes possible, the architecture that is genuinely different every time you walk a different block, and the IB pipeline at Niwot High School that makes the school question easy. For buyers who have been looking for the combination of community design quality, school pipeline, Boulder proximity, and price that Prospect delivers, the search usually ends when they visit.